Everybody's favorite folk artist, Steve White, is skipping town. He's moving to Athens, Ga., at the beginning of August and needs some money for the trip. Here's the deal. Fork out $20, and White will give you a ceramic Zozobra sculpture along with a raffle ticket. On Friday, July 23, from 5 to 8 p.m., he's hosting a reception at OFFCenter (117 Seventh NW) for an exhibit featuring customized PEZ dispensers by himself and Clay Shefs, as well as art by the 92-year-old folk art legend R.A. Miller. During that reception, White will draw the raffle tickets. Ten winners will get some fine pieces from his folk art collection, including work by Miller, Myrtice West, Roy Finster, Mary Proctor, C.M. Laster, Alan Pruitt, White, Shefs, Jeff Sipe and others. It's a very sweet deal. To get in on the action, call White at 232-2311, drop by his soon-to-be-dismantled Folk Farm at 445 Louisiana SE, or just swing by the OFFCenter reception. We're gonna miss you, buddy!

Corridos Sin Fronteras: Ballads Without Borders at the National Hispanic Cultural Center

By Steven Robert Allen

Not so long ago, songs served as newspapers. If someone got stabbed or a house burned down, locals didn't rush to a newsstand to read all the gory details. Instead, some clever balladeer composed a song about it—probably embellishing a few details to make the story more exciting—and everyone gathered around to listen.

Milner Plaza on Museum Hill

By Steven Robert Allen

Folk art has a couple obvious virtues. Given that it's often made by impoverished untrained artisans, it's more accessible than academic art. Plus, although this isn't always the case, folk art also tends to be relatively cheap. Santa Fe will host its first International Folk Art Market this Saturday, July 17, and Sunday, July 18, at the Milner Plaza outside the Museum of International Folk Art. The market presents an ideal opportunity to pick up a South African bottle cap sculpture, a Tibetan Thangka painting or some other nifty artifact from one of 40 countries being represented. $5, free for kids 16 and under. For details, call (505) 476-1203.

Harwood Art Center

By Steven Robert Allen

Douglas Kent Hall is one lucky bastard. During the late '60s and early '70s, he somehow nabbed a job photographing some of the greatest rock 'n' roll superstars of the age. Of course, it's what you do with your luck that counts, and Hall did spectacular things. His photographs of Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Tina Turner, Cream, the Grateful Dead, the Doors, Santana, Led Zeppelin and countless other legends are as jaw-droppingly dramatic as any you've ever seen. A retrospective exhibit of Hall's rock 'n' roll photographs opens this Friday, July 16, with a reception from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Runs through July 30. This show will rock you. 242-6367.

Oblivion

David Foster Wallace is not a fan of American culture. In books like Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Wallace revs up his pet peeves and sends them soaring. Oblivion continues this tradition with eight satirical stories that poke fun at the media, America's obsession with health, our lurid fascination with children and the falseness of advertising. It's hardly a new list of Wallace bugaboos, but in Oblivion he uses them as backdrops, pushing to the foreground a debate with himself over whether language is effective at all.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

The summer I turned 13 our neighborhood grocery store took the progressive step of making two checkout express lanes. I remember this not because I cared much about advancements in grocery store traffic engineering, but because the event introduced me to a crucial grammatical point: the difference between less and fewer. The store management had printed up bright signs with red letters reading "13 Items or Less." They didn't last long. Know-it-all customers complained about the grammatical error and the store had new signs printed up within a couple of weeks. Of course, that didn't mean the signs offering "Orange's 99¢" disappeared too.

A Carnivore's Inquiry

Katherine Shea knows all there is to know about cannibalism. She's intimately familiar with the most famous flesh-eating episodes in art, literature and history. Yes, she's a psycho. Murray's quirky protagonist drives this accomplished, new novel by the PEN/Faulkner Award winner.